Triumph (1993)

by Ben Bova

  Triumph (1993)

  Ben Bova

  What if...Winston Churchill had assassinated Stalin?

  In the tradition of Fatherland and SS-GB, Hugo Award-winning author Ben Bova unveils a fascinating tale of an alternate history-in which one bold, top secret plan changes forever the shape of the world.

  1945: As the War in Europe winds to its bloody close, and a crazed Adolf Hitler awaits the end in an underground bunker in Berlin, the Allied forces-led by FDR, Churchill, and Stalin -look warily at the post-war world-and at each other Once the war is over, who will control Berlin, as well as the future of Eastern Europe?

  In the world we know, the Red Army marched on Berlin and the Cold War began. In Triumph, however, Bova imagines another possible twist of fate, whose consequences result in both a new world order and gripping human drama that will keep you turning pages until the powerful conclusion.

  Convinced that Stalin poses a threat to democracy as great as Hitler, Churchill launches a risky, covert operation involving a ceremonial sword, future cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, and a small dose of lethal Plutonium.

  Mixing startling fictional surprises with genuine historical figures such as General George S. Patton and British spy Kim Philby, Triumph is an irresistible and compelling peek at a world that might have

  Author's note: In the universe you and I live in, President Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage on 12 April 1945. Josef Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union, lived until 1953.

  Chapter 1

  Moscow, 1 April

  How strange, thought Grigori Gagarin, to despise a man with whom I am so intimate.

  He looked around the small, dark office: at the worn high-backed leather chair up on its little dais behind the plain, unpretentious desk. The desk at which the orders had been signed that coldly sent uncounted millions to their slaughter. The room was stuffy, its one window tightly sealed and curtained, confining like a prison cell, rank with the pungent burnt odor of powerful tobacco.

  I hate Josef Stalin, he told himself. For the sake of my dead mother and father. For the sake of all those millions needlessly fed into the meat grinder of this endless war. For the sake of the innocents who were killed long before the war started so that Stalin could have his way, so that this upstart Georgian could rule Mother Russia with an absolute hand deadlier and stronger than any tsar's.

  For the sake of my dear little brother, the only other member of the family who still lives. But if this war goes as Stalin plans it, even little Yuri will soon enough be sucked into it and thrown to the flames, just like all the others.

  Every day, all day long, ten to twelve or even sixteen hours each day, Gagarin spent within arm's reach of the man he had come to despise with a hatred as wide and deep as Mother Russia herself. Josef Stalin. The butcher. The murderer. The blunderer who had nearly lost everything to the invading Nazis.

  I despise him, Gagarin said to himself for the thousandth time that morning. Then his eyes lit on the Sword hanging on the wall behind Stalin's desk. A beam of pitifully weak early April sunlight struggled through the curtains of the office's only window. It made the golden hilt of the Sword gleam.

  The one door to the office swung open almost silently, but Gagarin instantly turned toward Stalin as his master, clad in an unadorned Red Army marshal's tunic and loose-fitting trousers, shuffled in, bleary-eyed and coughing. Stalin nodded perfunctorily to his private secretary, climbed the one step of the dais and settled his thick peasant's body in the worn leather chair.

  Wordlessly, Gagarin moved the appointments calendar from the corner of the desk to its center. Stalin glanced at it as he reached for his pipe and the dark bowl of tobacco.

  "Send in Lavrentii Pavlovich," said Stalin. His course, harsh voice grated on Gagarin's ears.

  The absolute ruler of the Soviet Union had aged visibly over the past four years. The ordeal of war had grayed his hair. His once luxuriant mustache looked frayed and ragged.

  His face was lined and pocked like the surface of the moon. Only those in his inner circle saw him thus; to the millions beyond the Kremlin walls Stalin's image was still that of a vigorous man of middle years, the Man of Steel, the leader of Mother Russia against the invading fascists.

  Wordlessly, Gagarin went to the door that opened upon the outer office. Sure enough, Lavrentii Pavlovich Beria stood at the window, gazing out at the red brick wall of the Kremlin, waiting for his master's summons like a faithful dog.

  Beria's round face was pasty white. He had a high-domed forehead and thinning dark hair; a pince-nez perched on his considerable nose made his cold gray eyes seem unnervingly large. He wore his usual black funeral director's suit and tightly knotted dark tie. Every time Gagarin saw the deputy prime minister he was struck by Beria's physical resemblance to Heinrich Himmler. More than a physical resemblance: as commissar for internal affairs Beria wielded the same kind of terrifying power as the master of Hitler's SS.

  Even the other members of the Council of Ministers shuddered at the mere mention of his name.

  Deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union and a member of the State Defense Committee, Beria had recently been named a marshal of the USSR. Gagarin saw that he was slowly gathering the reins of power into his own bloody hands. Master torturer, the secret police were already his.

  Patiently, relentlessly, he was worming his way into the highest levels of the Red Army through coercion, terror and betrayal.

  Gagarin had seen it before. Stalin permitted one underling after another to gradually gain power. While they competed against one another they were no threat to the Man of Steel. But when Stalin sensed that one of them—any one of them, no matter who—was moving ahead of the others, that one suddenly died. He might be accused of plotting treason and sentenced to death by the courts. He might simply be thrown into one of the basement cells in Lubyanka Prison and shot in the back of the head, a sponge rubber ball stuffed in his mouth to minimize the blood spattered on the concrete floor.

  But Beria troubled Gagarin. He was cold and cunning, and patient as well as ruthless. Stalin, with all the burdens of this war on his shoulders, was beginning to depend too heavily on his deputy prime minister.

  "You have read Eisenhower's cablegram?" Stalin asked before Beria could even seat himself in one of the stiff" wooden chairs before the desk.

  Gagarin sat quietly at his own tiny desk in the far corner of the office. As Stalin's private secretary he was a fixture in the office, as unobtrusive as the silver samovar on the sideboard.

  I am invisible to them, he thought. Deaf, dumb and blind, as far as they care.

  Yet he was not deaf. He had heard words spoken in this office that would chill the blood of the crudest soul. He had seen whole armies consigned to annihilation over a whim, an accident of geography, the name of a city.

  "Eisenhower's cablegram?" Beria replied softly, in his whispered undertaker's voice. "The one of the twenty-eighth?"

  He had to look up to his master: Stalin sat on the hidden dais, and the legs of the wooden chairs had been shortened.

  Stalin had puffed his pipe alight and now he waved it angrily. "Yes. What other has he sent since then?"

  "He leaves Berlin to us," said Beria. Gagarin almost smiled. Lavrentii Pavlovich is waiting for his master to make his opinion clear. He is not so stupid as to take a position before he knows where Stalin's mind is.

  "A transparent trick," Stalin grumbled. "An obvious attempt to lull us into inaction while the Americans and British snatch Berlin out from our grasp."

  Beria stroked his soft, round chin for a moment, nodding.

  "Yes," he said. "I agree. A trick. Why else would Eisenhower tell us that he intends to stop his armies short of Berlin and allow us to take the city? It must be a trick."

&
nbsp; "Of course," said Stalin.

  As the two men talked—Stalin dour and suspicious, Beria smoothly accommodating—Gagarin busied his hands with the day's calendar of appointments. His head bent over the opened loose-leaf folder, his eyes stared at the page. But even as he listened to the two men across the small room, his thoughts drifted and his eyes focused on scenes from his memory.

  Grigori Alekseyevich Gagarin was the elder son of a carpenter from a collective farm about a hundred kilometers southwest of Moscow. In his thirty-four years he had seen revolution and brutal civil war, the forced collectivization of farms that starved men, women and children by the millions—including his mother and father—and now this inhumanly cruel war, where hundreds of thousands of men were sent to slaughter merely by moving a pin on a map.

  For the past twenty years and more he and the entire Soviet Union had been trained to adore Josef Stalin. All his school books had praised Stalin's love of knowledge and of children. A heroic statue of Stalin had been raised in the market town of Gzhatsk, where Grigori had been born, barely three months before the German bombardment destroyed it. Every radio broadcast was filled with news of Stalin. Every cinema show began with a newsreel showing Stalin bravely defending Mother Russia against the invading Nazis.

  Yet Gagarin had come to hate Stalin. It was not a hot, passionate, emotional hatred boiling up from the depths of anger or jealousy. His abhorrence was coldly logical, a sharp icepick at the base of the skull, a detestation that grew more painful with every passing day, every hour.

  When he had been a starveling child, watching his parents die as they gave their two sons whatever pitiful scraps of food they could glean, he had heard the whispers that Stalin was deliberately wiping out the kulaks, the independent farmers who refused to join the collectives.

  When he had been in the state school for foreign service and the great purges swept thousands into their graves, he was solemnly told that all these counterrevolutionaries had been plotting to overthrow the Soviet state and its revered maximum leader, Josef Stalin. He had thought otherwise, but kept his thoughts to himself. If he spoke out, there would be no one to protect his baby brother.

  A few years later, as Grigori was going through the early weeks of his first job in the great bureaucracy of the Foreign Ministry, Trotsky was hunted down in Mexico and eliminated.

  Everyone in the ministry professed unalloyed joy at their leader's triumph. But Grigori noticed how many trembled in their celebration. Who will be next? When will the knife turn on me?

  After years of condemning Hitler and his pack of thugs, the ministry rejoiced again when Molotov signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Rumors filtered through the ministry that the treaty included secret provisions that would allow Russia to reclaim much of the territory that the Poles had stolen and all of the Baltic states. A great diplomatic triumph engineered by the infallible Stalin.

  Twenty-two months later Hitler invaded Mother Russia.

  Everyone was shocked to the core. Under Stalin's orders, the Soviet Union had been shipping grain and oil and metal ores to Germany by the ton, even on the very morning of the invasion. The Nazi hordes made mincemeat of the armies that Stalin insisted on directing personally. Not until Mother Russia's greatest ally of all—winter—entered the fray was the invading tide slowed and eventually stopped just short of the gates of Moscow.

  Grigori had risen to Molotov's office by then. He was an efficient administrator, a rarity in the Foreign Ministry—or any other. Within a few months he was transferred to be the private secretary for Stalin himself. "The Great One has an eye for good workers," Molotov had told him personally.

  "I am very proud of you, Grigori Alekseyevich."

  Molotov also made it clear that he expected Grigori to keep him informed of who said what to whom inside the Man of Steel's office.

  It was in Stalin's office that all the old pains and doubts and terrors slowly coalesced into an icy hatred of the Great One. Grigori saw Leningrad surrounded and besieged because Stalin refused to send proper reinforcement to the "bourgeois" city. Whole armies were trapped and annihilated by the Nazi blitzkrieg because Stalin had years earlier purged most of the generals who knew anything about battle. New generals, untested except in their loyalty to the Great One who had appointed them, were summarily shot when they failed to stop the Nazi onslaught.

  Gagarin's greatest fear, even greater than the terror that his hatred would somehow be discovered, was that the war would pull his little brother Yuri into its bloody jaws. Yuri was only eleven years old, but already he spoke excitedly about learning to fly and shooting the enemies of Mother Russia out of the skies.

  The war is almost over, Grigori told himself time and again. The Nazis are on the brink of total defeat. But a voice inside his head would laugh derisively. The war against Germany is almost over, said the voice. Then comes the war against Japan. And after that, the war against the West. He won't stop until he is absolute master of Europe.

  And that means he will have to fight the Americans. There is no escaping it.

  Unless someone stops him.

  Chapter 2

  Washington, D.C., 1 April

  April began with a warm spring rain that brought out the Japanese cherry blossoms along the tidal basin and turned the Carrara marble of the new National Gallery a delicate rose pink. Now golden warm afternoon sunlight brightened the long windows of the Oval Office. The trill of songbirds filtered through the partially opened windows, mingled with the scent of freshly mowed grass.

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States for the past twelve years, leaned back in his wheelchair and tried his expansive grin on his unexpected guest.

  Winston Churchill scowled at his friend and comrade-in-arms.

  "We are not amused," he growled, "by General Eisenhower's naïveté."

  "Come now, Winston," said Roosevelt, "this is no time for us to argue. The war in Europe is practically won."

  "I know that. I am trying to avert the next one—against Stalin and his hordes."

  Roosevelt eyed the British Prime Minister. Churchill sat before the President's desk in the Oval Office, a round little fireplug in a one-piece royal blue "siren suit," looking as defiant and pugnacious as he did in the famous portrait photograph Yousuf Karsh had made up in Canada four years earlier.

  Standing somewhat uneasily by the fireplace was General George Catlett Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, tall and lean and austere. Roosevelt always thought that Marshall had the same air of incorruptible honesty and purpose that George Washington must have had. Tremendous dignity. Tremendous integrity. But cold, aloof, hardly human. Only once had Roosevelt made the mistake of calling Marshall by his first name; the general's icy stare made it clear he would tolerate no informality, not even from his Commander-in-Chief.

  Only the three men were in the Oval Office. The aides that Churchill had brought with him, all the White House secretaries and staff, even the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, had been excluded from this very private conference. No one except the President, the Prime Minister, and General Marshall.

  Rummaging through the zippered pockets of his suit, Churchill broke the lengthening silence. "I must say, Franklin, that you seem to be in uncommonly good spirits."

  "I feel very good. In the pink, you might say."

  "You do have a healthy color to you," Churchill said, pulling his cigar case from the capacious chest pocket of his suit. "I noticed it at Yalta, in February. You appear to be in better health now than you were a year or two ago."

  "I gave up cigarettes more than two years ago," Roosevelt said jauntily. "And I've never felt better."

  "So that's it."

  "I did it on the advice of an old acquaintance I first met during the First War, over in France in Nineteen Eighteen. A heart specialist from Boston. His name, Paul Dudley White. He warned me that if I didn't stop smoking I'd probably die of a heart attack or a stroke."

  "Nonsense!" Churchill snapped. "Smo
king has nothing to do with heart disease. I've been smoking all my life and look at me."

  Roosevelt smiled again. "You seem rather pale and nervous, Winston."

  The Prime Minister hesitated, then put the cigar carefully back into its silver case. "This Boston heart specialist hasn't talked you out of strong spirits, I hope."

  Roosevelt threw his head back and laughed heartily.

  "No, no. Not at all. Missy will be in here with cocktails directly, I promise you."

  Churchill made a tight smile back. "Good. I had feared the worst."

  The President pressed a button on his intercom box, then wheeled his chair around the corner of the desk and gestured toward the pair of sofas placed on either side of the empty white marble fireplace. "Make yourself comfortable, Winston. General Marshall, you sit down, too. It hurts my neck to have to gawk up at you."

  Poker-faced, Marshall folded his lanky frame into one of the sofas. Churchill took the one facing him and the President rolled his chair toward them.

  The far door opened and Roosevelt's private secretary came in bearing a tray of martinis in wide-mouthed, thin-stemmed glasses. Another woman followed her with a cocktail shaker in one hand and a small bowl of olives in the other.

  Once these had been set wordlessly on the low table between the sofas and the women silently had left the room, Roosevelt gestured to the cocktails, then bent forward to take one himself.

  "To victory," he proposed, raising his glass.

  "To clear vision," Churchill countered.

  Marshall raised his glass but said nothing. He barely sipped at his martini.

  "Now then, Winston, what's the trouble? What's brought you winging all the way over the Atlantic? Surely it can't be Eisenhower's memorandum."

  "It most certainly is," the Prime Minister said, with some fervor. "If he's allowed to carry out the plan outlined in his memo of twenty-eighth March, it will be the biggest strategic blunder of the war."